When IFComp wrapped up in mid-November, we ran into a snag. Not with the results — those were great. But the games did not immediately get released to the IF Archive as they usually do.

As you may know, I wear many IF community hats besides “IFTF person”. One of them is “person who wrangles the IF Archive, when wrangling is necessary.” Generally it’s not necessary; David Kinder has been handling the day-to-day work of processing files for many years now. However, David’s time has been more constrained of late, and as a result we’ve had an increasing backlog of files in the Archive’s “unprocessed” folder.

Obviously I should have started wrangling at that problem months ago — it’s my hat. I let it slide, and I apologize for that. But IFComp was the spur to getting the conversation started. In the course of that conversation, our friend (and fellow IF fan) Doug Orleans said, “I’d be up for helping out with some IF Archive maintenance duties.” And we said, “Ooh that’d be great.”

Result: Doug has been chewing down the unprocessed backlog for several days now. And, to be sure, David is still helping. (David is the one that got the IFComp results page set up, and also wrote down a bunch of documentation to help Doug get started.) Thank you, Doug, and congratulations on your new hat.

The IF Archive is not an IFTF project, but it’s right in the middle of our mission territory: it preserves IF and keeps it available. So I am happy to count this as time spent wearing both hats. Also, I can blog about it here.

The software and community around it are in great shape, and I think they have a great future. But the time has come for somebody else to take charge â I want to focus my energy on new projects, and hand over what Iâve built to somebody else who has the passion to drive things forward.

Alex approached us several weeks ago, but running these sites would be too much load for IFTF at our current scale. (Five people, all of whom juggle many hats!) What we can say is this: IFTF is willing to take possession of any open-source IF code base. This just means that we’ll move it to a designated location on Github, which will serve as an “adopt me!” flag — IF projects which are looking for new maintainers and developers.

This option is open to Quest, as Alex notes in his blog post, and to any other IF tools that have been floating around loose. Please contact us!

(Only with projects you have the rights to, please. We want to be able to say “adopt this project with the original creator’s blessing.”)